Toono

Sambuu Street:
The city spent billions on street repairs last summer, which made life in UB a living hell as most roads were shut down for repairs. We struggled to take the Zen approach and meditated (read: medicated) ourselves through the summer, all the while envying friends who have managed to escape to the country. Did the final results justify our agony? Hard to say, although Sambuu Street, the road that runs from Geser Sum to the Little ring Road (past Tengis Movie Theater), seems to have benefited the most. The pedestrian …

UB is supposedly the world’s coldest capital, but it may also be the hottest given its scorching hot summers and lack of air conditioning. To make things worse, summer is hot water outage season. If you take regular showers, you may have noticed that UB’s district heating network cuts hot water in every district for two whole weeks. They say that the downtime is needed for network repairs and maintenance operations (we think that the engineers only do this to torture us because they are underpaid and grumpy).

As Chris Rock once said, “I’m thirty-nine, right? And I still luv rap muzik! I LOVE it! Whatever music they were playing when you started getting laid, you gonna love that for the rest of your life”. Well, I’m 26, and I love rap music. By now you pretty much guessed what I was listening to when I started getting laid. Obviously, I don’t rock Wu-Wears, Sean Johns and Rockawears anymore, but I still download every new album and mixtapes by my favorite artists, and even secretly spit some lines …

The movie begins with a boy meeting a girl. The audience expects the good-looking couple to get hot and heavy, and patiently sits through the entire 90 minutes, only to be rewarded with an innocent kiss at the end, before the director cuts to a wedding scene, or worse yet, the credits. This is the basic premise of romantic comedies, or at least one way to look at them. Just like I presume the life of an average American couple to be something along the lines of ‘Zack and Miri Make a Porno’, people around the world imagine American life to be a rosy variation of a ‘rom com’.

Unbeknownst to big shot gallerists and collectors in New York and London, UB is home to a thriving contemporary art scene. In our inaugural English edition, we introduce you to its major players and influential movements. Here is all you need to know about Mongolian contemporary art (sheep’s head not included).